All too often, minutes, and sometimes even seconds may mean the difference between life and death in hospital emergency rooms, EMT ambulances and other trauma sites, such as for example, explosion and crash sites, battlefields, etc. The advent of portable diagnostic equipment, such as sonogram equipment, now allows first responders to diagnose internal trauma and other ailments. The mortality and morbidity rate is thus decreased when the diagnostic tools that were once only available at fixed locations, such as hospitals and other trauma centers, can be brought to a patient.
The same positive results that stem from fast diagnostic capabilities exist in fixed locations when the equipment can be easily moved from location to location instead of remaining fixed. This then allows the diagnostic tools to move to the patient instead of the patient being moved to the equipment.
This portability is not without some complications. Even with highly portable equipment there sometimes is a need to “rest” the equipment on a dock so that the care giver can adjust knobs, take notes, move the probe, download information, charge the battery, and/or perform other tests on a patient. Also, all portable equipment must have a source of power. When working in a fixed facility, that source of power is the electrical utility usually manifest by power outlets spaced apart on a wall. When the device is in the portable mode a battery inside the device is used to provide power. However, just like so many of the devices (cellular telephones, pagers, etc) that are in common usage, battery management becomes critical.
When any number of different people use a certain piece of equipment, such as a medical diagnostic tool, in a portable mode, battery management becomes critically important. One can hardly imagine a more inopportune time for the power to fail than when a measurement is being taken on a critically sick or injured person using a portable diagnostic tool. Precious life-threatening minutes are then lost in opening the device, retrieving the old battery, finding a new charged battery and then inserting the new battery and resealing the device. And all this presumes that the care giver has a freshly charged battery near by. In fast-paced trauma situations, this can be problematical.